I’ve been away a lot with work this last month. When I’m away on my own, I catch up on my reading and, like everyone in unfamiliar places, I look around me more. One evening in Galway a few weeks ago, I was in the hotel bar, ready to have dinner and perhaps a drink or two before bed. I had a new book with me: Max Blecher’s Scarred Hearts.
Max Blecher, a Romanian, died in 1938. He was twenty-nine years old. When he was twenty-seven years old and dying of tuberculosis of the spine, otherwise known as Pott’s Disease, he wrote to his friend Mihail Sebastian:
“I tell myself that Jules Renard died in 1911. At a distance, death becomes so inconsequential. I just have to imagine that I too died a long time ago, in 1911. I’m not scared of death. Then I’ll rest and sleep. Ah, how well I’ll stretch out, how well I’ll sleep! Listen, I’ve begun to write a novel. But I don’t feel that I absolutely must complete it. If I die first, I don’t think I’ll even regret not having finished it. What a minor thing literature is for me, and how little of my time it takes up!”
